Research

Awards

Lucelia Artist Award

2004—Kara Walker

Kara Walker is the fourth annual Lucelia Artist Award winner. She is best known for her large-scale silhouettes through which she explores difficult contemporary social issues. Using a theatrical sense of narrative and melodrama, Walker examines representations of the antebellum South. By employing stereotypes as her subject she calls them into question. In her hands, the genteel early silhouette tradition is transformed into a powerful tool for addressing provocative ideas.

Walker's work has been shown widely across the United States and Europe including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1997 she received a coveted MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, or "genius" grant, and in 2002 she represented the United States at the Sao Paulo Bienal in Brazil.

Walker was born in Stockton, Calif., in 1969. In 1991, she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Atlanta College of Art, then went on to earn a Masters of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. Currently she lives and works in New York City and teaches in the department of the arts at Columbia University. Brent Sikkema Gallery in New York City represents Walker.

Jurors:

Jack Bankowsky, editor-at-large at Artforum

Garry Garrels, chief curator of drawings and curator of paintings and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City